I’ve been waiting for…ooh, just over a year, for someone to do this. Recantha, an old hand here in the comments and on the forums, has built a tricorder.

There surely can’t be anyone here without a passing familiarity with Star Trek, but just in case: the tricorder is a made-up thing used by the crew of the Enterprise to measure stuff, store data and scout ahead remotely when exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilisations, and all that jazz. Despite its made-up-ness, the tricorder remains a terribly desirable thing. I’ve always wanted to be able to tell whether my planet is M-class or not.

Recantha has bodged together his home-made tricorder using a Pi, some sensors (two for temperature, and one each for magnetism and distance), an LCD display, some switches, a light-resistant resistor, a thermistor and an Arduino Leonardo clone. We hope he keeps adding sensors to it, and maybe, later on, a camera board, until he runs out of space. How about a Geiger counter (this one already works with the Pi)?

Here’s a spot of video explaining what everything on the Picorder does:

(Best of all, the whole thing is cased in LEGO.)

And here’s some more video, showing the thing in action.

If you’re interested in reproducing or building on this project, Recantha’s blogged about it (he has an excellent website, all about Raspberry Pi), and has left a guide to the project over at Pideas, the new site for collecting Raspberry Pi projects. (Go and add something of your own!) Thanks very much for this, Recantha; our office costume parties will now have a dash of added realism. Jamesh has drawn the short straw and will be dressed as Nog.

That’s a nice kit, tho the price is a bit steep for the complete kit, building the sensors yourself would be better (plus you learn more in the process)… in fact a redesign of the shield for the pi would be good too (to make it more compact).

An EMF sensor would be great to have (at least to test out the theory)…. and I’ve found one. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Bke3750WE
That’s saved a bit of money, just need a A/D chip. Maybe make it better by using 2 sensors to get a bit of depth perception.

Unfortunately, if you surveyed anywhere around most public places with the Picorder, all you would be able to say from your measurements is “There’s no intelligent life down here, Captain.” :(

A friend works for Inficon, which makes semiconductor chemical and multi-spectral (e.g., IR, UV, etc.) sensor devices, and I’ll see what they can do in the way of supplying samples of them to interested folks, since they usually only deal with corporate customers and government contractors involved in industrial process monitoring and control, anti-terrorism countermeasures, etc.

Nothing like handing over your kit to developers to discover new and innovative uses for your products, and I think does the company profile good (a product must be easier to sell when you have lots of examples showing you what it can do).

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I promise I won’t make a TSA inspired scanning device…obviously medically useful in a tri-coder, but may be a “few” social issues to resolve. (and probably a couple of safety issues too I would imagine)

The nice thing about most sensors is that they’re quite cheap. This means that even if you can’t get some of them working (and I have a couple) it’s not the end of the world. Adafruit’s tutorial area is always a good place to start for some tutorials on basic sensors :-)

Price depends on yield and demand and, as you can probably imagine, some of the more esoteric sensors aren’t exactly what’s needed in every smartphone, much less simple to fabricate. AIUI, the holy grail is to shrink a mass spectrograph down to the size of a chip from that of a suitcase, which has previously been reduced from the size of a room over the past decade, or so.

As I recall there were some great things being done with FAIMS a few years back – not quite mass spectrometry, but it’s a fairly sensitive analytical technique that lends itself to miniaturisation. I dread to think what it would cost to add to a Pi, though. According to a quick Google, it still seems to be in the “if you need to ask, you can’t afford it” range.

I wouldn’t mind trying out a few myself, and being a tricorder its going to be a fair few.
Things like: EMF, radiation, bio-infomatics (there’s debian-med to help with it), spectrum analyser…. I could add more but I may be pushing my luck ;)

So that’s what they mean by a starship running on impulse power … and warp speed must mean you get even worse mileage when driving a sports utility starship at speeds that would bend environmentalists’ minds! That’s what the laws of thermodynamics would suggest, at least – talk about huge increases in entropy, to say nothing of what happens to all of that depleted dilithium once the joy-riding is over :( I’ll bet it would make Dreamliner batteries even more “flamboyant” ;)

The key to a project like this is to log the data publicly so it can be mapped, and together we can crowdsource a new view of the environment we live in. Cosm.com (used to be Pachube) might be useful for that sort of thing.

I would love to have that Geiger counter board, but at $220 U.S. that’s a bit more than I can afford on my budget. I was on the NBC (nuclear biological chemical) team in my unit when I was in the military, so having that information would help ease my mind after the disaster in Japan.